There is a basic reason Peyton Manning is the quarterback of the Broncos and Tim Tebow is not. His name is Tom Brady.

The NFL is a team game in name only. Quarterbacks rule the league.

These scores just in:

Manning 37, Oakland 6. After four consecutive losses on home turf to the hated Raiders, the rout felt good, didn’t it?

Brady 52, Buffalo 28. With 340 yards passing and three touchdown throws in New England’s victory, his stats were sexier than Gisele Bundchen.

You can bet Brady’s performance made Manning look. The two greatest NFL quarterbacks of this generation have a long history. In 11 previous meetings when Manning was a member of the Indianapolis Colts, Brady established bragging rights, winning seven times.

“That’s two great quarterbacks going at it. They might not say it, but they want to outdo each other,” Broncos running back Willis McGahee told me Sunday.

The fun 76,787 Broncomaniacs had clowning the Silver and Black on a sunny Colorado afternoon might well have never happened without another score from almost nine months ago in the NFL playoffs: Brady 45, Tebow 10.

Brady and Tebow crossed paths departing the stadium that cold January night in New England. The bona fide superstar was leaving with a smile on his face and a lingerie model on his arm. After vowing to Broncos Nation he would improve, God’s quarterback was huddling with his family.

As members of the NFL quarterback fraternity often do, Tebow and Brady hugged.

As quickly as their embrace ended, any semblance of a rivalry between Brady and Tebow died.

Remember what John Fox said? “We’ll do whatever it takes to get better,” Fox insisted after the clock struck midnight on Tebow’s miracle run with a postseason dismantling by the Patriots that undeniably proved Denver was nowhere near ready to be a serious Super Bowl contender.

If Tebow wasn’t already on his way out of Denver, Brady gave front-office executive John Elway the motivation to grab a broom. Elway stuck his neck out with a big-money offer that landed Manning and the creaky neck of the 36-year-old quarterback. The Denver secondary was overhauled. The Broncos announced to the league that they were back in the business of pursuing championships, with no Plan B.

Getting crushed by the Patriots in the playoffs made Denver cornerback Champ Bailey realize a harsh reality: “Obviously what we were doing wasn’t good enough,” he said. “We needed to be different. We needed to be better.”

That’s why the beat down of Oakland was encouraging. It’s what true contenders do. Denver exposed the Raiders as a team without a clue and showed no mercy for the visitors’ ineptitude. Other than a botched fake field goal that demonstrated kicker Matt Prater throws an even worse spiral than Tebow, maybe the lone surprise was the Broncos didn’t officially stamp the game as a rout until they scored 21 points in the third quarter.

“The key that I’ve said all along is just trying to keep making progress, somehow. That doesn’t always show on the scoreboard. You’d like to win every game as you’re feeling your way and learning about your team and learning about yourself a little bit,” said Manning, who threw for more than 300 yards in a game for the 65th time in his career and returned the Broncos back to .500 in the AFC West standings at 2-2.

What Manning and Denver need to figure out next: Are they ready to take this show on the road and beat an elite NFL team?

“We have a lot of work to do. We are nowhere near where we want to be or what it takes to be a championship team,” Bailey said. “We are striving toward it. We just have a lot of work to do.”

With a return trip to New England on Sunday, this is Denver’s chance to see how far it has come.

“It’s the same team, but with a different attitude and a different demeanor,” said McGahee, scanning the Denver locker room.

This is why Manning endured four surgeries on his neck. To chase another ring. To do battle on equal footing with the Patriots. To stare Brady in the eye and dare him to blink.